Black Friday in Heartless Country

America 2.0 has the deals

So after recovering from all the turkey, stuffing, green beaned casserole, and pie, millions of Americans will be hitting the stores early today. Very early. Some stores now start Black Friday on Thursday evening. Kind of an Ebenezer Scrooge version of Midnight Mass. Big Savings! Greatest Deals! Mayhem and Trampling!

Now, I have long avoided any store on Black Friday. Maybe six to seven years ago, I did venture inside a Best Buy, late on Black Friday evening, while waiting to pick up my daughter. I don’t know, maybe all the amazing, incredible, unprecedented deals were gone by then. I didn’t see anything special at all. The “deals” weren’t even great sales prices. But I don’t claim to be an expert on capitalism. I wrote Survival of the Richest after all. It just seems to me that, if you proclaim it loudly enough, in big, bold, bright colors, that much of the public will think they’re getting a bombshell, one time, lowest ever deal. Even though the numbers should tell them otherwise. Most people are followers. The Bobbysoxers were persuaded that scrawny Frank Sinatra was a dreamboat. The conditioning can even work on celebrities. Somebody convinced Ted Danson that Whoopi Goldberg was a catch. Heidi Klum and Seal?

Black Friday tends to not only bring out the phoniest aspects of our rigged economic system, it also tends to bring out the worst in shoppers. Remember how on Black Friday 2011, poor Walter Vance dropped dead in the middle of a Target store in West Virginia? Not a single shopper paid the least attention, stepping around or over his body in the aisle. Someone couldn’t have at least called 911? Instead, they pursued those bogus bargains, with the kind of maniacal fervor that must have existed during a witch burning in Salem. Just on that one particular Black Friday, in that same store, another Manchurian Shopper used pepper spray on others, so she could grab a much coveted video game. And an exhausted Target worker fell asleep at the wheel, driving her car into a canal. But those deals! Those bargains! I’m sure it was worth it to the worker. Maybe they paid her extra for Black Friday. $15 an hour, baby!

I don’t remember hearing about Black Friday when I was a kid. But it’s a certainty that my mother would never have risked life and limb for allegedly great deals. I don’t think any other adult female I knew then would have either. Women were generally less crazy then, I suppose. One thing I know for sure; if a man had dropped dead in a store back in 1966, Black Friday or not, the other shoppers would have noticed. Would have tried to render aid, and certainly summoned medical assistance. I imagine anyone who witnessed something that tragic, in 1966, would have been devastated emotionally. But in 2024, Americans are completely desensitized. To gratuitous violence, from war footage or crime scenes on the local news. Well, except for the mass casualty events, that is. There’s never any offensive footage there. Remember, security cameras mysteriously don’t work in those situations. Neither do cell phones.

Black Fridays should focus our attention on the fraudulent nature of “sales” in general. Sure, my wife, who is a Hall of Fame shopper, does get some incredible deals. Lots of free stuff. But she puts an amazing amount of time into it. You have to do a lot of shopping to get those kinds of bargains. That’s why she’s in the Hall of Fame. I remember going to the big “blow out” bonanza at a local Circuit City, when that chain was forced to close some years ago. Up to 90 percent off! Everything must go! So I checked the blank CDs and DVDs (I was doing a lot of disc burning back then), and was shocked to see that these most astounding, never before seen deals were actually higher than the frequent sales price for the same items. I questioned a few employees, who just shrugged. I think one said, “that’s what they do,” or something. I tried to alert the other shoppers, who looked at me like I was saying “9/11 was an inside job.”

That ‘s why I don’t profile as a good shopper. I’ll never be in the Hall of Fame. I ask too many questions. I notice too many things. It was pretty obvious that Circuit City, like most or all big stores that are forced to close, simply raised their regular prices, and then “marked them down” as much as 90 percent. After all, you’re dealing with a marketplace that has advertised $9.99 instead of $10 for probably over a century. There is no competition, in that or anything else. They all list their prices the same way. They know that people are really that unthinking. Get your Ginzu knife set for only $19.99! If you act within the next ten minutes, we’ll throw in this genuine no- stick frying pan! And now we have Cyber Monday. I do peruse Amazon that day, and have yet to find any spectacular, once in a lifetime deals. They have post Black Friday deals, and post Cyber Monday deals. Kind of makes it all seem less special.

At holiday time, all the magnificent, never heard of deals seem all the more enticing with Christmas music playing in the background. Sure, you’ll hear very few real Carols, as the plutocrats like to keep the Jesus out of Christmas. But the festive songs do lift your spirits. Like millions of other Americans, I’m a sucker for Christmas music. Okay, except for the odious Eartha Kitt and her Santa Baby. But just try to stop me from dancing when Darlene Love croons Christmas (Baby Please Come Home). It can’t be done. That was one of the coolest things David Letterman ever did, until he developed that nasty case of TDS; having Darlene Love on his show every Christmas season, to sing her riveting song. He does have a beard that makes him look like Santa Claus now though, to be fair. You know Deep State jesters like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert would never do that.

I hope they don’t spoil the yule tide with World War III. But they might. They’ve been hanging it over our heads for several years now. The “Greatest Generation” didn’t toy with Hiroshima like that. Say what you want about all the Allied atrocities, which I documented thoroughly in Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963, and the new American Memory Hole: How the Court Historians Promote Disinformation, but those boys knew how to storm the beaches. How to rape and plunder. In the 1940s, they liked their wars long and brutal. Lots of casualties. Victory Gardens. Buy bonds. They understood the lessons from Lincoln’s war criminal generals. Don’t spare the women and children. Don’t spare their food or shelter; burn their homes and destroy their crops. Salt the earth so they can’t grow new food.

We may not have the gumption of the “Greatest Generation,” but we’ve outdone them in terms of heartlessness. Lack of empathy and compassion. What happened to Walter Vance in Target could never have happened in a truly civilized country. One where the population still felt empathy for others. One where a dead body in the aisle of a store would cause some to faint, and raise the heartbeats of everyone. One where other shoppers would have instinctively stopped looking for illusory “deals,” and tried to help another human being. Imagine how Walter’s family felt. Assuming he had a family, that is. Maybe his family was as dysfunctional as seemingly most families are now. Still, unless he was shopping for himself, he must have been buying presents for someone. So I publicly apologize to whatever loved ones Walter Vance had, for the inexcusably callous behavior of my fellow Americans. I wouldn’t have ignored him.

Remember Kitty Genovese? She was killed in New York City in 1964, while her neighbors ignored her pleas for help. Revisionist history has it that thirty eight of her neighbors really didn’t witness the murder without summoning help. Who knows? They lie about everything, it cannot be repeated enough. But the fact so many people were outraged by the original news reports indicates just how uncommon such disinterested behavior would have been sixty years ago. Now, it would be shocking if anyone tried to get help for a damsel, or even a transdamsel, in distress. They would probably pull out their smart phones and start recording, however. Cell phones work perfectly well in such situations. Just not in school shootings. If I were inexplicably walking through some Hollywoodish dark alley, and was accosted by a dangerous “White Supremacist,” I wouldn’t expect anyone peeking out of a window to help me.

In 2021, a woman was raped on a Philadelphia public transit train. The entire incident lasted some forty minutes, and fellow passengers just sat that passively, with some filming the crime on their cell phones. I guess the rapist didn’t care that his crime was being recorded? Should have made it pretty easy to identify him. Maybe he thought it was a like a mass shooting event, where bystanders oddly refuse to take photos or videos. Stories about the incident, in contrast to the shock over the 1964 Kitty Genovese case, mentioned some ridiculous new psychological term, “bystander effect,” which describes how people are less likely to render aid in group settings. This, of course, makes about as much sense as most psychological terms. Logic would dictate that one would feel bolder in a crowd, and therefore more likely to intervene. But I am a mere community college dropout, so what do I know?

I know there are plenty of people who hate the holiday season. Who enjoy saying Bah Humbug to Christmas. I coined the term American Loneliness Phenomenon to describe the the plight that millions of Americans find themselves in. Of course, a festive period, built around happy family celebrations, would be incredibly depressing for those who find themselves utterly alone. For them it isn’t a wonderful life. I think suicide rates are highest at Christmas time. If that doesn’t say something about the moral state of our society, I don’t know what does. No point in hanging mistletoe in the homes where only one person lives. Many people have told me they are happy being alone. That’s the important thing; happiness. No one should be forced to be in the company of others. Too many of us are bothersome. But it’s those who are involuntarily alone that I think about. Nothing is sadder than forced loneliness.

I wish I had invited more people who don’t have anyone else to Thanksgiving dinner. Walk the walk and all that. I think the fact that so many spend Thanksgiving alone is an indictment on the lack of family cohesion in America 2.0, and is directly connected to the appalling lack of empathy that can result in what happened in the Walter Vance case. I’ve commented before on how the Golden Rule has been all but outlawed. Few believe in it, and almost no one practices it. If you treat me okay, I’ll treat you okay. Do onto others? Remember, Ayn Rand- hero to millions on the modern Right- stated that we have no moral obligation to help our neighbor. Jesus said love thy neighbor. I don’t think Ayn believed in Jesus. I’ve watched too many Frank Capra films, and read too much Dickens. You can’t have the Golden Rule without empathy. Born Againers- the Golden Rule is Christianity. Help those who need it. Then enjoy your shopping.